When I had visited my acquisition in company with my benefactor’s lawyer, I had not been surprised when, as we went in through the great iron gates, he said:
‘Of course, Mrs Dupont-Jacobson never lived here after her husband died. She thought the house was unlucky. A superstitious woman in some ways.’
Paint was peeling off the window-frames, a once-ornate portico was battered and damaged and some of the downstair windows were broken. The whole place was grimy and neglected. All the same, a certain grandeur still clung to it in its decay and it was possible to see that, in its day, it had been a fine, generously-built house.
‘A lot will have to be done before I can sell it,’ I said. I had made the same remark to Niobe earlier, and I made it again as she and I stood on its front lawn. She made a statement which the lawyer, perhaps, had been too tactful to utter.
‘You’ll never sell a place this size, Chelion, however much you do to it,’ she said.
‘A school, perhaps, or a nursing-home might buy it,’ I hazarded.
‘I doubt whether it’s suitable for either. I suppose you’ve got a key? Let’s go inside,’ she said.
The interior of the house told the same story as the outside had done. The whole place needed not so much redecorating as renovating. There was a noble staircase with cobwebbed banisters and a grimy sidewall on which had been painted a trompe l’oeuil effect in imitation of the banisters themselves, but which was now picked out with a coat of depressing dark brown, peeling paint, and the whole mansion had the same depressing effect on me.
An upstair room in the shape of a double cube with what must have been a wonderfully ornate Jacobean ceiling before smoke from the enormous open fireplace had blackened its coloured splendours opened into an ante-chamber which, like the other rooms on the first floor, had hideous Victorian wallpaper and a nasty little iron fire-grate which ruined its otherwise spacious attractiveness. As well as this, cracked and broken windows had allowed the elements to do their worst, apparently for years, and water seemed to have come through the ceiling. The other rooms were similarly affected.
We tried the second floor, climbed to the attics and, when we had descended to the ground floor again, explored what must have been the housekeeper’s room, the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall. We inspected the enormous kitchen and its scullery and then returned to the entrance hall with its stone screen and the dado made up of the coats of arms of previous owners.
‘I’d have to spend thousands,’ I said again, ‘even to make it habitable.’
‘I know exactly what I should do with it if it were mine,’ said Niobe.
‘Pull it down and sell the park for building land? I doubt whether I’d be allowed to do that.’ I was glad to find her ready to talk rationally about the house and what I was to do with it. She had maintained what I took to be a grim silence up to this point. She had not even lived up to her name and wept. She was much given to tears when things went wrong.
‘No, I don’t think you would be allowed to sell the park for building plots,’ she went on. ‘There would be planning permission to get, and all sorts of involvements, I expect, and you never were much of an organiser, were you? No, I can tell you what to do with it, Chelion. In fact, I could do it all for you while you’re in Paris. I don’t want to stay on at the pool. It won’t be the same without you.’
I was afraid she was going to turn tearful at this, so I said hastily. ‘Well, you can’t expect me to go on with a job like that, now I’ve no necessity to earn a living, but tell me what you’ve got in mind, however crazy it is.’
‘You’d have to pay me a salary, of course,’ she said, ‘but I’d be satisfied with the same money as I’m getting at the pool.’
‘Let’s hear this crack-brained scheme of yours.’ But, when she outlined what it was, I said, ‘Good Lord! That will never work!’
‘Of course it will work. You’ll get masses of tenants in no time. There will be a waiting-list. Elderly people who’ve sold up houses which are too big for them will give anything for accommodation they can rent instead of having to buy. There is the park for them to walk or sit about in, a lake you can stock with fish, a seaside town and its shops close at hand—’
‘Only close at hand if you’ve got a car. Elderly people may not be prepared to drive.’
‘Well, get a car. Get two cars, one self-drive and the other chauffeur-driven and charge car-hire prices. They would more than cover the chauffeur’s wages.’
‘Each flat would need its own kitchen and bathroom.’
‘I know that. Look, why don’t you leave everything to me, as I’ve suggested? I’m sure I can manage. I’ll be able to give a good account of my stewardship, I promise you. Now we’ve – how does it go? – said goodbye for ever, cancelled all our vows, done our best and worst and parted, and all that, there could be so easy a relationship between us.’
‘Oh, look here,’ I said, ‘what vows have we cancelled?’
‘Don’t be silly, Chelion. Will you let me do as I suggest?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I’d have to put a ceiling on what I could allow you to spend, though, you know. I’m no Soames Forsyte to be employing an architect for whom the sky’s the limit.’
‘I’ll get plenty of estimates and then, when we reach your ceiling price – although I hope you won’t be niggardly – I shall stop the work. If necessary, we’ll finish it ourselves when you come back.’
‘You can count me out on that score. Interior decorating is well beyond my scope. I’ve always known it. Oh, well, get your estimates and then we’ll see,’ I promised. After all, I owed her something for having been engaged to her during the years when, I suppose, she could have found somebody who would have married her, and I was grateful, too, for the calm way she had accepted the break-up. She must have read some of my thoughts, not an unusual state of affairs, because our friendship, if such it can be called, had lasted so long. She said, without bitterness:
‘You need not think you have wasted the best years of my life.’ She said it with a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing of the kind. Life begins at thirty, Chelion.’
‘Not for a woman,’ I thought. On impulse I kissed her, but met with no response. What is more, she remained dry-eyed.
Chapter Two
Nest of Vipers
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(1)
SO, by the time I got back from Paris, all the alterations had been completed, the repairs and the interior and exterior decorations had been done and my first batch of tenants had been installed. Niobe had managed to turn the house into ten flats and of these only two were unoccupied.
The renovations surprised and pleased me very much, but the inhabitants of my newly-furbished property pleased me a great deal less. Niobe had prophesied that there would be tenants, but those I found in possession of my house were ludicrously different from any I might have envisaged.
I had thought of a retired naval or military man, a wealthy widow or two, a well-known actor or actress ‘resting’ between shows but still well able to afford the rent of a flat on my well-situated property, a business man still keen on a round or two of golf, a couple well-heeled enough to afford a spacious apartment while they waited to get possession of a house they were buying, and perhaps a wealthy recluse happy to find peace and security far from the madding crowd. Instead of these comfortable, predictable types, all my tenants turned out to be writers of one sort or another.
‘I thought you’d feel more at home with them, being a writer yourself,’ said Niobe. ‘Birds of a feather, and all that, you know.’
‘Birds of a feather can peck one another to death,’ I said ‘and these aren’t even “of a feather”. What has Evesham Evans in common with Constance Kent?’